Tuesday, January 14, 2014

Amy Welborn Intervew

DS:Some of your previous books have been explicitly catechetical in nature, while this work is more personal and narrative. Still, you talk about aspects of your faith that might be unfamiliar to those from other religious traditions. How did you look at that in terms of the larger work—the inclusion of specific aspects of Catholic belief?AW: There was a bit of tension and some questions about that, to be sure. In my initial drafts I mentioned all of those things: relics, the Eucharist, praying for the dead, purgatory—without much, if any explanation. It was felt that more explanation was needed, and I resisted—we came to a middle ground, I think. I wanted the book to have a wide appeal, but at the same time, I didn’t want it to become either didactic, with too much explanation, or bland, by taking out the particular Catholic matter—the last would have been impossible, anyway.